Saturday, August 15, 2009

Harry Pussy - In An Emergency You Can Shit On A Puerto Rican Whore

If there's one thing that Miami noise rock legends Harry Pussy understood better than any of their envelope pushing peers from the always controversial "'90s grunge scene," it's that there's nothing more punk than defecating on minorities. And that is exactly what Adris, Bill, and possibly nobody else do on this delightfully brief Long Player from 1993.

20 excessively brutal minutes of free jazz bullshit. "Harry Pussy" is a funny name for a band and "Fuckology" is a funny title for a song and while honorary avant noiselords Peter Brötzmann and Iannis Xenakis deserve every ounce of the sort of serious music beard stroking bestowed upon them over the years, sometimes you just gotta let loose and revel in the ridiculousness of shaping one's musical identity around creating such a purposely unholy racket, not to mention knowing that somebody somewhere is actually going to want to listen to it.

And who says you need to have jazz chops or a written philosophy in order to dick around like this and not have everybody assume you're full of shit? Like Whitehouse, Big Black, and that other "pussy" band before them, Harry Pussy puts an admirable amount of effort into making every aspect of their music's presentation as over the top and abrasive as possible. There are "songs" here, sure, but all they do is sort this lo-fi diarrhea spewage into digestible 2-3 minute long portions. The cymbals are bashed as if there's nothing in the world that sounds better than cymbals. The guitarist seems to be strangling out some sort of minor key melodic lines here and there but mostly just ends up making a mess that's somewhere between Lick My Decals Off, Baby and that video from the CD of The Ascension. And the vocals... well, they're a bunch of god awful shrieking. Spastic freakouts are interrupted by melancholy slow parts. The ugliest Kraftwerk cover ever gets played. The woman behind the drum kit apologizes for knocking a glass over. And my god, if it isn't all simply free noise nirvana.

Sometimes there just isn't much like treating yourself to a good ol' assault on the ears. It's why we have D.R.I. and early Napalm Death and it's why In An Emergency You Can Shit On A Puerto Rican Whore is able to do its job so efficiently. This is confrontational freeform noise rock performed with as much joyous energy as you're going to find in music. I can only imagine how special a band this willfully cacophonous sounded during the mid '90s, especially one that managed to not get sucked into the trappings of (occasionally entertaining) hyperactive Gravity Records scenester nonsense. Even after their influence has burrowed a labyrinthine network of tunnels throughout the underground, Harry Pussy remains fresh, original, seminal. So do Couch and Arab On Radar. AIDs Wolf and Eat Skull, not so much. There's a point where tuneless garbage actually becomes tuneless garbage and it's downright unacceptable. Only settle for the finest!